Google Services Including Gmail, YouTube Suffer Major Outage (bloomberg.com) 104
Services from Alphabet's Google experienced widespread outages around the world, preventing people from accessing Gmail, YouTube and other services. From a report: Errors ranged from "something went wrong" on YouTube, to "there was an error. Please try again later," when attempting to log into the company's mail product from about 6:30 a.m. in New York. Google tools were failing to load for users in the U.S., the U.K. and across Europe, but began functioning again for many people after about an hour. Google confirmed there was an outage for the majority of its services according to a Workspace Status Dashboard, which monitors the health of its products, but just before 8:00 a.m. it said functionality was restored to the "vast majority" of users. "We will continue to work toward restoring service for the remaining affected users," it wrote in a post on its service status page. It hasn't said what caused the problems.
It's the Russians (Score:2, Funny)
Not satisfied with giving O365 users a digital wedgie, APT29 going after G-Suite users next. :)
Film at 11.
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So one thing I don't understand. Why are so many of these tough manly self sufficient conservatives afraid of Kamala Harris?
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The greatest desires masquerade as the greatest fears.
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This is the most unintentionally funny comment I've ever seen.
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Based on how quickly Harris sank to the also-rans category in the Democratic primaries, I'd say there are also a lot of Democrats scratching their heads about Harris, not just Republicans.
Re:It's the Russians [hitting Harris or Google?] (Score:1)
Judging by the results, it looks to me like Harris was being politically astute. She made sure that Joe Biden knew she had some chops, but then she pulled back and waited. Sometimes waiting is an effective course of action.
My own feelings are mixed. Really hard to say which is worse as a profession, lawyers or politicians. It would be nice if we could get statesmen and stateswomen to fill those job slots, but we went and put the front-end of political campaigns in the way, so we seem to be stuck with politi
Public masturbation of 966895 (Score:2)
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You're such a nasty boy! (Score:1)
you like to watch?
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Bot is on full auto rapid fire today! (Score:1)
I like your style, you freak!
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
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Great stuff! Join the fun! (Score:1)
Let's call of your "public masturbators" together. It will be a feast for your eyes!
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-4
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They're just testing the kill switch for Day One of the Harris presidency.
Person, man, woman, camera, tv. At least Biden can drink from a cup one handed. And even with a broken foot can probably handle a ramp better than Trump.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Google needs splitting up now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google needs splitting up now (Score:4, Insightful)
My educated guess is that's exactly what happened.
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It wasn't DNS related. At least not externally. The sites would come up and provide content - they would display a "refined" error message. It was something internal to their systems.
Re:Google needs splitting up now (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand it was an issue with their login service. So if you visit Youtube in incognito/private mode then it was working fine. In some ways using a common login system helps users manage all their services under a single account, simplifying logins, but yes, in cases like this, a lot of services that depend on a single login can be adversely affected if something goes down.
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Given that it worked in incognito, there could easily have been a way for them to failover during the outage if they designed around this failure mode.
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Bets on whether they are currently working on that very design?
Re:Google needs splitting up now (Score:5, Insightful)
It was the user tracking system, not user login. Oh, wait, it's the same one.
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Of coruse not, but logged user can be tracked better.
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From what was seen lately, they seem to reference an 'internal storage quota issue'.
Maybe somebody accidentally tried to backup all their data and it choked their own storage network.... lol.
Or somebody let something run that wasn't well tested.
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Too many services under one company. A video site shoudn't interfere with a mail service.
Sounds like you're arguing against cloud service providers entirely -- when Amazon has an outage it too takes down many otherwise unrelated businesses. Which is the same thing that happens when GCP goes down.
It was back fairly quickly (Score:2)
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And no one died due to lack of youtube for 30 min.
Why are you so confident about that assertion?
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Depends the hardware vendors (well Dell and Lenovo) all have there serving howto videos on YouTube,. Which is great on two accounts. Firstly on new hardware or rare procedures you can familiarise yourself with the procedure before you go into the data centre so you are not dicking around trying to work out which screw where needs to be removed so you can change part X. Second I have an excuse to have a YouTube tab open :-)
Anyway if YouTube is down that might delay me fixing something, which could in rare in
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too bad. I had hoped that it would be down for a few days. Then uses might get the idea that putting all their eggs in the cloudy basket is just asking for trouble.
Cloud services should be 99.{five nines}% reliable. After all, many mainframe sites can get that so why not cloudy stuff?
Given the downtimes that almost all popular cloud services have had at least one outage this year they aren't getting the uptimes that people expect.
Russian Hack (Score:3, Interesting)
With the Treasury hack through SolarWinds, supposition is Google's issue might be related.
Microsoft, FireEye confirm SolarWinds supply chain attack: https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]
[John]
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I don't think google is running their back end from Windows.
Re:Russian Hack (Score:4, Funny)
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Dumb question... did Chromebooks even work during the Google outage? I couldn't get into GMail or any other Google service that required a login, so I'm wondering if that impacted authentication for those devices as well.
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Dumb question... did Chromebooks even work during the Google outage? I couldn't get into GMail or any other Google service that required a login, so I'm wondering if that impacted authentication for those devices as well.
You can log in offline. If you're already logged in, pretty much everything would work fine without authentication, except where the actual content you're trying to get to (e.g. Gmail) is behind authentication. Google Docs, etc., would work as long as the user had offline usage turned on.
Re: Russian Hack (Score:2)
So no. I love single point of failure designs! Remind me why we have the cloud again?
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So no. I love single point of failure designs! Remind me why we have the cloud again?
You apparently didn't read the post you responded to.
Didn't notice an outage (Score:2)
Back in the day... (Score:2)
It hasn't said what caused the problems.
Didn't have this problem when Luddites ruled the world.
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This is interesting .. from the BBC. The cause of the problem is unclear. However, while it lasted, users were still able to access the websites' landing pages in "incognito mode", which does not store a log of the users' browsing activity.
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Amazing what a difference a decade makes. 10 years ago a 30 minute hiccup in service in an internet company would be par for the course and barely noticed. Now everybody loses their minds over it.
If we weren't all internet junkies before then we sure are now, god forbid it ever goes down indefinitely.
Re:Back in the day... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is over time, we pile more and more eggs into fewer and fewer baskets.
20 years ago, an outage of this nature would have impacted a very specific logically related portion of a web experience. Alta Vista went down, and one web search site went down, you went onto another and no other services really noticed.
Now, a datacenter having a problem in Virginia may knock out internet presence of thousands of companies and services.
Or some part of a mistake in Google knocks out 'the' search engine the internet uses, online school for thousands of schools, youtube, online meetings for thousands of companies, car navigation, email, and probably a litany of other services.
The outage itself may not be a huge deal due to duration, but it illustrates just how fragile we have let the online ecosystem become.
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Yes and no. Whether we drop a carton of eggs once a year, or simply fumble an egg once a month the resulting impact from the outage is the same. The issue isn't we've got too many eggs in one basket, the issue is we have dramatically increased our desire to have omelets for breakfast.
i.e. The rate and scope of service outages isn't the issue, it's that we've become wholly dependent on those services. I look to the 2017 wannacry as an example. Maersk went down hard and ceased being able to process shipping c
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The issue being that the eggs all in one basket greatly limits potential for backup plans and makes those backup plans more severe in their impact.
Google absolutely should not have this much dominion over so much of the internet. Whether by mistake or on purpose, they can kill a lot of the online ecosystem.
Having only a couple of popular CSPs is pretty bad too. Microsoft and Amazon are ultimately responsible for way too much online infrastructure.
Sure, a lot of tasks that don't inherently have a hard depend
When? 3 days ago? (Score:4, Funny)
And will probably be reposted tomorrow.
Re: When? 3 days ago? (Score:2)
So Slashdot doesn't use Google systems then?
Let’s see... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let’s see... (Score:5, Funny)
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Said no one, ever.
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Re: Let’s see... (Score:2)
... and the Bing service is available in China too,, so yeah, it's useful.
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Google engineer: Hmm, servers are down. I’ll just goog... oh wait.
This is a joke, but in fact it is closely related to a big potential problem: Suppose that the Google SREs were relying on Gmail, Google Chat, etc., to communicate (that's how Google employees communicate most of the time). If that were the case, when those services were down, communication needed to get them back up would be blocked. If if there were some backup comms infrastructure, but the SREs used the regular Google services on a daily basis, they might forget how to use the backup mechanism, or it mi
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Walkie-talkies.
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Walkie-talkies.
Very long-range walkie talkies, capable of spanning continents and oceans.
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As do I because it's silly not to. (Score:2)
Storage is trivially cheap. Having one copy of your data means you don't care about your data.
Google is now officially an "it". (Score:2)
Because when was the last time anyone here ever spoke to a human at Google.
If all humans were replaced and only an "AI" was running the show, would we even be able to tell? (OK, it mostly does, at this point.)
Can anyone check if the Sundar's eye glows red when you punch it?
Internal tracking failed (Score:2)
The Google internal tracking system went down, which tracks and links all user activity globally against all their services and every app and web page which shows Google ads. Since the entire point of Google's existence is to track everything you do in order to monetize you, they simply shut down their services. If they cannot monetize your activity then what's the point?
Actually I came across this code on the dark web that was stolen from Google:
if (trackUserActivity(data) == false) {
print(
Yeah, but ... (Score:2)
Yeah, but, DuckDuckGo.com still worked fine.
My Google Home stopped working as well (Score:2)
I noticed that my Google Nest Hub stopped responding to voice commands during the outage. I couldn't turn my "smart" lights on and off this morning because of it.
Why does turning a friggin light bulb on and off require an Internet connection to Google? Something like that should work without Google's servers, since both the Google Nest Hub and the "smart" light are on the same Wi-Fi network.
Oh no! (Score:1)
AWS Outage less then 30 days ago in MS next? (Score:2)
AWS had an Outage less then 30 days ago is MS next? Be for the end of 2020?
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I believe MS's last one was in October.
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Google Classrom is down perish the thought! (Score:1)
Couple of week ago (Score:1)
I had this happening to me for days a couple of weeks ago. Something like that. Very annoying. Sometimes it would just about get to where it would paint the gmail screen and then error. Other times it was an immediate error. Eventually everything was fine.